For 400 years, Taiwanese have been subject to foreign colonizers -- first the Dutch and Spanish, then the Manchu Empire, then the Japanese empire and finally the "Republic of China" KMT Chinese Nationalist Regime of Chiang Kai-shek and his son. In particular the last 100 years of first Japanese then KMT rule were brutal in attempted obliteration of Taiwan's Identity. Herein is chronicled the fight for its recovery.

Friday, August 14, 2009

The following was sent out from the email of a Golden Melody Award winner 2004 for best singer - non-pop category Rs Livlivang [see rs-legend.org]. She is from the Paiwan Austronesian people and has a cafe/studio in Hsindian. The Paiwan ancestral homeland is in the mountains of south Taiwan covering Taitung and Pingtung Counties - areas affected by some of the worst flooding/landslides, etc. It looks like you can be sure of direct and personal impact if you help them. I do not know any more details other than what is in the email, but from my interaction with them Rs and her husband seem very diligent in their labors on behalf of Taiwan's Austronesian peoples.

The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan is also organizing relief efforts. See the following statement by PCT General Secretary Andrew T. C. Chang and Moderator of the General Assembly Leonard Tsung-jeng Lin.

If you are near National Taiwan University in Gongguan you can stop by their General Assembly Office and ask how you can contribute to help. Address: No. 3, Lane 269, Roosevelt Road, Sec.3, Taipei,106 TAIWANTEL: 02-2362-5282

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Music of Samingad is connected with that of Austronesian peoples from other places including Hawaii accompanying a video about Taiwan's connection with the peoples from Hawaii, Rapanui, New Zealand, Philippines, Malaysian, Indonesia all the way to Madagascar. I think this is a very good brief introduction to the languages, cultures, and history of the Austronesian peoples.

If you actually go to the youtube page, you'll see a lot of good comments from many places around the world that are quite helpful and informative.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

In this video, you can see that Taiwan is capable of competing globally in music, videography, fashion and design. And you can see that the Taiwanese language also has an expressiveness not captured in Mandarin. Notice also the occasional splashes in the background of the main writing script for Taiwanese (apart from Han characters) -- a romanized alphabet, in which most of the books using the Taiwanese language over the past century have been written.

Now imagine what would happen if Ma Ying-jeou's ECFA and other schemes of causing Taiwan to be dependent on China were to be put into effect. This continued growth of creative expression cannot be sustained in an authoritarian environment such as China's. To allow Chinese music and film industries to invest in Taiwan's would be to allow China's government to control some of Taiwan's leading industries in Asia. What will keep China's government -- which makes decisions based on increasing its own power -- from taking steps to marginalize Taiwan's music and movie industry? Nothing would keep them once they leverage Chinese government controlled money in getting power over the direction of Taiwan's companies. And they will do it. So anyone in the industry who has visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads need also have those dollar signs linked by shackles of slavery. You will end up leaving your homeland and being forced to move to Shanghai or Beijing and also to self-sensor.

Over time, Taiwan would diminish. Anything "happening" would be "happening" across the strait. All the young folks would have to move their to make it big... Over time, the harsh-sounding Mandarin of the north would be imitated in the way the Chow Yun-fat has done in his interviews for the DVD's Pirates of the Caribbean -- At World's End. Though he could have spoken in English, or his mother tongue of Cantonese, he chose to use Beijing Mandarin, a language that was not in use at the era portrayed by the Pirates movies, but a language that already is infecting Hong Kong as the language of power and the language to toady to the dictators in Beijing. Maybe he's proud of the JUAN-SHR harsh curled sounds that he made. But it is sad that a native of Hong Kong would not use his own mother-tongue now that Hong Kong has been controlled by China for ten-plus years.

China would be even more harsh if it were to annex Taiwan some time down the road. It would attempt what the KMT started -- an eradication of any identification with Taiwan.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Ilan County is the home of the Koa-a-hi, a style of traditional opera that was started in 1910, and because of its robustness, it quickly spread, overtook, and replaced all previous styles of art song and theatre in Southeast Asia and China wherever there were communities of ethnic Han peoples who hosted and viewed these performances in conjunction with traditional religious practices and temple worship.

I-Lan is also the home of the Lan-Yang Dance Company, the most famous in Taiwan. Now one of its members has received international recognition. Lee Chen-wei (李貞葳), an I-Lan native, was recruited to perform with an internationally acclaimed dance company in Israel. We wish her well and hope that a successful career will bring Taiwan international respect and understanding as Tainan native Ông Kiàn-bîn 王建民 (usually transliterated into Mandarin as Chien-Ming Wang) has done through his career with the New York Yankees professional baseball team.

One uses bó͘, "certain; particular," to particularize a mountain without specifically naming which one. Notice that in English the word "certain" has a broader range of meanings whereas Taiwanese uses distinct words.

• Unfortunately, because the R.O.C. government-in-exile suppresses the use of Taiwanese and other non-Mandarin languages in public schools in Taiwan, there is not much opportunity to learn the vocabulary of the non-Mandarin languages associated with an academic setting. Furthermore, few essay or papers in these languages have ever been written by students. The normal editing processes are never experienced. The following Taiwanese expressions describe editing practices.

* Underline this sentence = "kā chit kú ê ē-bīn oē sûn"

oē = draw ; sûn = line ; ē-bīn = underneath

[Notice the homonym: the noun oē 話 in "kú-oē" meaning speech/word and the verb oē 畫 meaning draw/sketch. These two homonyms are obviously different in their Han characters. But actually in the romanization, one has very little trouble differentiating them because of their distinct parts of speech and the noun often being associated in a compound word and the verb often being associated with an object -- e.g. kú-oē "sentence" vs. oē tô͘ "draw a picture" ]

Kho͘ is a verb that means "to circle" ; kho͘-á is the noun that means "a circle" -- just as in English one can say: "Circle this sentence." or "Circle a circle around this sentence." Or to get more fancy you could translate it as "Circumscribe a circle..."

* If the word or phrase is really poorly written, sometimes you should just strike it out. Taiwanese is quite vivid in the way to say that. Jack-the-Ripper fashion, literally, you say "kill/murder/slash that sentence!" = "Kā hit kú-oē thâi-tiāu." or "murder that word..." = "Kā hit jī thâi-tiāu." This word "thâi," meaning kill/murder/slash w/knife, is also what someone who is good at bargaining can do: Kā i thâi kè-siàu. "Cut/kill the price."

• Poa̍h-kiáu 賭博 means "gambling." In the fall of 2009 there was a referendum being held in Phêⁿ-ô͘ (Penghu or the Pescadores) on whether or not to allow gambling casinos ( kiáu-keng ). Unfortunately, gambling profits are often controlled by organized crime ( o͘-siā-hōe ) and corrupt government officials ( tham-ù ê chèng-hú ). Where you find casinos you also find drugs ( to̍k-phín ), violence ( po̍k-le̍k ), sexual crimes ( sek-chêng ), and human trafficking ( jîn-kháu ê bé-bē) where the victims are controlled with drugs ( iōng to̍k-phín khòng-chè in ). A few people or mafia organizations can make huge profits off gambling, but for most residents, there is no benefit ( hó-chhù ) but rather an accumulation of societal problems -- particularly addiction in its various forms.

· Taiwanese still has the saying with variations that basically translate as "An Austronesian Grandmother and a Hoklo Grandfather" --- For example,

"Ū tn̂g soaⁿ-kong, bô Tn̂g-soaⁿ-má." -- "Have a Han grandfather, but no Han grandmother..." With that intermarriage of Austronesian and Han that makes up today's Taiwanese people, I thought it would be interesting to share some marriage and kinship related terms:

Chheⁿ-ḿ 生姆 or originally written 青姆 means a son or daughter's mother-in-law. Mandarin uses a different word: 親家母

This expression "teh ùn tāu-iû" is used in social circumstances to describe very short visits. If someone "drops by" and then leaves, it is like dipping food in soy sauce.

This expression is also very appropriate to describe the attitude of the Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek's regime. They treated Taiwan as a temporary place from which they would fight back to China. They spoke of winning back China within three years after fleeing as refugees to Taiwan in 1949. So you can notice today that all the beautiful architecture is mainly from the Japanese era (pre-1945). The KMT regime put up many hasty structures, allowed squatter shack communities of former soldiers to take over many of the parks in the cities, and generally allow industry to heavily pollute the environment and degrade the landscape because they thought of Taiwan mainly as a resource to be exploited before heading back to China.

These two words are what the colonialist KMT Chinese Nationalist Party and the Japanese empire before them in Taiwan did in an attempt to destroy Taiwan's native languages.

• "developed baby fat from nursing" hàng-leng

When a nursing infant grows well with lots of fat rolls, one does not call the infant the common words for "fat" such as pûi-ê or tōa-kho͘-ê. Taiwanese has this special word hàng-leng for "baby fat." If you say that about a baby, the mother will be very delighted to receive the complement. Incidentally, the word tōa-kho͘ literally means "large circumference" and kho͘ specifically refers to the metal bands that circle around the old wooden buckets and hold the pieces of wood together. (Or think of whiskey barrels.)

In Taiwan, you can still sometimes bargain for things you buy. But unlike Thailand, it is usually pretty standardized so that people are not automatically marking up the price 400 percent because you are a foreigner. So even if you do not bargain, you can get a decent price in Taiwan.